1. M.I.A., "Bird Flu" (from Kala, Interscope)
2. Life Without Buildings, "Liberty Feelup" (from Live at the Annandale Hotel, Absolutely Kosher)
3. The Schema, "Those Rules You Made" (single, self-released)
4. Amy Winehouse feat. Ghostface Killah, "You Know I'm No Good" (from Back to Black, Republic)
5. The Fiery Furnaces, "Navy Nurse" (from Widow City, Thrill Jockey)
6. Sylvia Hall, "Don't Touch That Thing" (from Cult Cargo: Grand Bahama Goombay, the Numero Group)
7. Dizzee Rascal, "Pussyole (Old Skool)" (from Maths + English, XL)
8. Farah, "Law of Life" (from After Dark, Italians Do It Better)
9. The Shins, "Turn on Me" (from Wincing the Night Away, Sub Pop)
10. Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings, "I'm Not Gonna Cry" (single, Daptone)
11. The New Pornographers, "Myriad Harbour" (from Challengers, Matador)
12. The Human Hearts, "Professionals in Cancun" (from Civics, Tight Ship)
13. GusGus, "You'll Never Change" (from Forever, Pineapple)
14. Deerhoof, "The Perfect Me" (from Friend Opportunity, Kill Rock Stars)
15. Uncle Wiggly, "Maroon Mock Turtle" (from Rock Slide! [Rarities Vol. 2], self-released)
16. Antibalas, "Beaten Metal" (from Security, Anti-)
17. Franz Ferdinand, "All My Friends" (single, DFA)
18. Joanna Newsom, "Clam, Crab, Cockle, Cowrie" (from Joanna Newsom and the Ys Street Band, Drag City)

This year, everybody's taste was suspect. What you like is never just what you like: your aesthetics reflect your ideology, and my aesthetics, I know, reflect mine. But Jesus, did you see what Idolator said? More to the point, did you see what they didn't say? Pitchfork gave that record a 4.3—but, you know, what do you expect from indie-rockers? Rolling Stone, of course, keeps pushing the Rolling Stone stuff, and Blender is hyping up the Blender¬-y things. And the blogosphere! And the radio! And Williamsburg! Who is paying Williamsburg off? So you can decide for yourself how much my favorite songs of the year represent my own dubious hidden agendas; note, in particular, how exhausted, bitter, and petulant most of them are.

One legitimate complaint against this mix—and this is a complaint I have about my own taste, too—is that a lot of it is firmly planted in familiar styles. Dizzee's dis is so old skool he's reusing the "It Takes Two" Lyn Collins loop, Life Without Buildings are Velvets revivalists, the Fiery Furnaces retread Zeppelin, Franz Ferdinand covering LCD Soundsystem is 1981-meets-1981. But there was barely anything that sounded genuinely new to me this year, or even like a considerable leap forward instead of a not-yet-totally-worn-out configuration of old ideas. In the year that Ike Turner died, it would've been some kind of poetic justice for some young genius to have a huge hit with her own equivalent of "Rocket 88," but no such luck.

I'll also disclose some of the specific biases behind the songs I picked here. I'm really fond of do-it-yourself impulses (and have never hated the decaying remains of the music industry as much as I did this year), and the Schema's yacht-rock bonbon "Those Rules You Made" was a hit—on YouTube, anyway—that was produced by former art-punk type Rhodri Marsden as an experiment to see exactly how far he could go with a homemade recording and no record label. Sharon Jones' "I'm Not Gonna Cry" is present because she and the Dap-Kings put on the best show I saw all year (and the Dap-Kings were the secret ingredient on Amy Winehouse's record and various other Mark Ronson productions) and because I'm a vinyl fetishist and was delighted she put her best song of the year on a 7-inch instead of her album. GusGus's "You'll Never Change" is on the mix because it sounded amazing at a volume higher than I'm ever likely to hear it again. Also, two songs involve artists whose records I've released in the past.

Finally, Sylvia Hall's "Don't Touch That Thing" is on there because it was the track I played most this year—a glorious little song against sex that jumped out at me from Cult Cargo: Grand Bahama Goombay, a compilation of early-'70s funk that had never previously been heard outside the Bahamas. In the old music-biz era (before everything that's ever been a hit got reissued and global music recycling got a lot more fluid), I'd probably never have been able to hear it myself. But it also occurs to me—and this is just a hypothesis, so please set me straight in the comments if you think otherwise—that something as ephemeral, amateurish (in the best sense), and specific to its place as "Don't Touch That Thing" would be much less likely to get recorded now. There's barely such a thing as a "local scene" anymore, or an environment where a new band can spend a couple of years playing for 200 people while they're working out what they're doing, and maybe put out a handful of singles, before they have to start worrying about backlash or filling out an album or selling themselves to 2000 people or 20,000 or everybody on the Internet. Not coincidentally, that's the kind of environment that spawned most of my favorite music.

Douglas Wolk is the author of Live at the Apollo (Continuum, 2004) and Reading Comics (Da Capo, 2007). He lives in Portland, Oregon.